Coldbrook (Hammer)(48)

Jayne felt a sick coolness on her forearm, and then hot pain as the woman bit through her skin.

Unable to breathe, she went limp, and as the woman tried to adjust her grip Jayne fell across the seats and kicked out as hard as she could. The swinging door shoved the woman back against the neighbouring car. Jayne sat up and reached out, slamming the door closed, hitting the locking knob, crying out in victory and pain.

Her arm was bleeding liberally from the bite. I’ve got it, she thought, and then she saw Spartacus and his young son standing up in front of the car. They looked around, faces slack and eyes empty, paying no regard at all to their wounds or each other. Then they saw her through the windscreen.

She heard their faint, haunting call.

The woman who’d bitten her – the woman with a peach ass – pressed her face to the side window, staring in. Her mouth hung open, and her teeth were stained with Jayne’s blood.

They’ll keep punching until they come through the glass, Jayne thought, but the woman turned and walked away. Spartacus and his son went in different directions, and then they were lost from sight behind the neighbouring cars.

Jayne screamed. She knew that she should remain silent, stay down and out of sight, but she was a different Jayne now, and she was more afraid than she had ever been before. She could see Tommy’s body in front of the car, but knew that everything had moved on.

She put her left hand over the bite on her right forearm. The blood was warm and sticky. They’re just biting, passing it on, rabies or something worse. She waited for whatever was to come, wondering if she’d feel the switch between being her and being one of them, and thought about the zombie films that Tommy had liked so much, and the online discussions he’d entered into, arguing the case for running zombies. They’re hunters! he’d tell her, and she’d shake her head and mutter something about him being an overgrown kid.

Jayne kept her stare fixed on Tommy’s body, ignoring the other movements she saw in her peripheral vision, and plucked her mobile from her jeans pocket. As she tapped in 911, she wondered how the hell she could make whoever answered believe her when she did not yet believe this madness herself.

Her vision darkened and she felt a familiar faint coming on. Not now not now . . . But she drifted away, and when she opened her eyes again an unknown length of time had passed. The sky was darker, the mountains above her lit by weakening evening sunlight, and three people were milling around the cars in front of her. All of them were shredded things, though none of the blood looked fresh. She thought they were checking the cars. Her vision swam once more and she rested her arm across her chest, bite on display, as the churu sucked her down again . . .

In dreams there were dead fingers massaging her awake, leaving trails of slick, rotting blood across her hips.

She woke again, jerking upright and crying out as the pain scorched in from her stiff joints. Tears came and blurred her vision, and she wiped her eyes with her arm, forgetting the wound. It was red-raw and still trickling blood, and perhaps that was good. Cleaning the wound, she thought, so that I don’t change and start doing what those things were doing. And then she saw the little girl standing in front of the car.

Jayne gasped and sat up straighter. It was dusk now, maybe an hour since it had happened. Tommy was a shadow on the ground, and there was no sign of the three wandering people she’d seen before. They must have looked in on me. Maybe one, maybe all three, and did they stand there and stare as I slept?

The little girl wore her hair in a ponytail.

‘Poor kid,’ Jayne whispered, and her illness dragged her down once more into unconsciousness. Her cousin Jill called her across a stretch of water turned red with blood, reaching out but unable to touch. I was coming to see you, she said to Jill, but I stopped and found peace with Tommy, and Jill smiled in understanding and waved her urgently across the water. But I can’t, it’s dirty, I’m clean, and if I step in I might . . .

But Jill shook her head. She beckoned to Jayne, and—

—when she woke up her feet were kicking in the footwell, her arms thrashing at the seat, and she was trying to swim. She shouted out again in pain, crying herself fully awake. Her head thumped with the remnants of unconsciousness.

Jayne gasped and took several long, deep breaths. No one and nothing moved around her. Tommy was still there, and the little dead girl had gone. Across the car park lay another body, its face turned away from her. Breathing hard, afraid of another blackout, she searched for her mobile phone. When she found it she dialled 911 again.